While the original Foursquare app has grown into a hodge-podge of location-based social networking and Yelp-like location discovery, Swarm (free) is focused on the social location end of the deal. It has some intriguing features and a great new design, but it lacks a compelling core. Veteran users looking for check-ins, badges, and mayorships will probably be frustrated and new users will probably won't find a need for Swarm to fill.

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Join the Swarm The big new feature in Swarm is Neighborhood Sharing, which shares users' approximate location with friends without their having to do anything. On the main page, you see your friends organized by distance to you—500 feet, 1 mile, 5 miles, and so on. Does this creep you out? No worries. Just swipe the orange bar at the top and it turns gray, indicating that Neighborhood Sharing has been deactivated. I can easily see turning it on and off depending on how social I feel in the moment.

Foursquare began streamlining the check-in process over the last several updates, and Swarm goes even further by automatically selecting what it thinks is the right location for your check-in. I am surprised that, despite my having been active on Foursquare for years, Swarm rarely picked the right spot for me. Thankfully, correcting Swarm's assumption takes just a few taps.

You can add a picture (food, drinks, and seflies are popular), one of 10 stickers, and a brief description. If you're with friends, you can tag them and they'll be automatically checked in. This last option debuted in the old version of Foursquare and really streamlines the check-in process for groups and couples.

Once you've checked in, Swarm lets you share that activity through Facebook or Twitter.

Your activity appears in the feed to the right of the main page, where your friends can like or comment on your carousing. I like that the stickers stick to each check-in so I can have a rainbow unicorn at PCMag but then have a frothy beer at the PCMag Party Deck. You can also tap on any user in your feed to see their check-ins, but my favorite feature is the ability to limit alerts about my friend's check-ins to always, never, or only when we're in the same city. But if you're absolutely hungry to see everything that's happening on Swarm, buzz over to the Notifications panel on the far right.

The Plans section of Swarm seeks to bring you and your friends to the locations where you're checking in. Write a quick post indicating your intentions to chill somewhere, then tag the people and places involved using the @ sign. I had some trouble finding the locations I wanted using Swarm's auto-complete, which is disappointing. Your friends will get an alert that you have big plans, and can indicate their interest by tapping the I'm Interested button.

Private SwarmSwarm deserves credit for making privacy settings easy to understand. I am especially happy to see Swarm include fine-grained privacy controls. You can limit who can see your email or phone number, should you decide to add them, and prevent friends from checking you in. You can even hide your profile from public listings of check-ins and from owners of the locations you're checking in to.

You can also completely shut down Swarm's background location gathering—which, by default, Swarm can do even when the app is closed—and prevent Foursquare selling behaviorally targeted ads based on your data outside its app and website. If you simply want to keep a list of the places you've been, Swarm gives you that option.

Finding the settings menu in the orange labyrinth of Swarm can be tricky. The main features are shown prominently along the bottom, but the exact location of profiles and locations is harder to nail down.

Dispersing the Swarm I imagined that the three core features of Swarm—Check-ins, Plans, and Neighborhood Sharing—would work together seamlessly. I assumed I'd be finding and creating plans based on my current location and my pals would be kept up to date of my Plan's progress as I checked in at its locations.

Sadly, all three of these features operate more or less without regard for each other. Plans encourage communication, but they don't facilitate it very well. Unlike Facebook Events, there's no start or end time, no RSVP or reminders, and limited messaging. Also, your check-ins don't appear in your Plans.

If Swarm isn't much of a party planner, you might expect that Foursquare's trademark gamification would be the star, but it's been mostly stripped away. So long, mayorships and limited edition badges. That said, Foursquare appears to be having second thoughts, and might introduce new takes on familiar features.

Swarm feels like the next logical step for Foursquare. It looks great, and makes it easy to manage a lot of settings and alerts. If you're like me and really enjoy checking in, you'll love it. But I do feel like Foursquare didn't want to put Swarm into any one niche, and shied away from realizing the app's potential as a social-planning app. Perhaps the forthcoming revamp of the companion Foursquare app will help, but I suspect that Swarm will have to go back to the hive.

Max Eddy is a Junior Software Analyst investigating the latest and greatest apps for Android. Paranoid by nature, he's also keeping an eye on emerging threats and countermeasures at SecurityWatch with Neil Rubenking and Fahmida...

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